Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (50 page)

“That's not Xoe Chloe speak.”

Temple pulled Mariah back to check out the open bar and the three bartenders. One of them was Su.

The videographers prowled the perimeter like hungry wolves, filming the audience, the scene, even the cat who dogged their footsteps, Midnight Louie.

In fact, he was doing more than dogging their foot
steps, he was sniffing them, like a dog.

She spied Crawford Buchanan on the sidelines interviewing a Teen Queen candidate so tall he could look up
her skirt by pretending to drop his notebook, which he
was bending to pick up at the moment.

Creep.

Louie, perhaps drawn by the rolling pencil, had rushed over and was now sniffing his shoes.

Must be the muck that stuck.

“
What's my mother doing now?" Mariah asked.
"She's, ah . . . pulling out one of those little mirrored lipstick holders and putting on lipstick."

“What? She never wears lipstick. It must be a secret signal." Mariah pushed past Temple to peek again.

“
She is! And that guy is watching her. Ick! That is way
too . . . too."

“I'm sure it's a signal," Temple said confidently. That was the truth. Public lipstick applying could be. But she
looked again. Yup. The guy was watching Molina's every
move. That kind of signal didn't usually bring on the tactical squad.

“
Listen," she told Mariah, feathering her fingers
through the new haircut for maximum "perk.”

“Just think about getting up on that stage without tripping and doing your talent routine. That's our job tonight. Let the police and your mom do their jobs."

“I wish Matt was here."

“
I don't." Temple put a hand to her straight blonde hair,
the lime green ostrich feathers on her long sleeves fluttering like wings in the corner of her eye. He'd have a bird!

“You look really . . . different."

“Higher praise I could not get. Now we better get into our lines and get ready to suffer through twenty-eight three-minute presentations. You know how long that is, counting applause, if we get any?”

That forced Mariah to think and get her mind off her mother's performance in the audience.

That's what it had to be, Temple decided. No way
Molina was flirting. No way.

“Sixty," Mariah was saying, "an hour. And . . . twenty-four minutes."

“
Add another forty minutes for the judges to score
each act and for people to waste time getting on- and offstage."

“
We'll be here
forever!"

“
Certainly will feel like it." Temple pinched the curtain
shut and prepared to be trapped backstage while all the action was going on out front.

Theater was like that. She just hoped the police found
some likely suspect for the string of murders that had
wiped out three generations of one family so far, a family
already decimated by a miscarriage of justice that never ended.

Every blonde seemed to be ahead of Temple on the play list and every blonde seemed to do a Britney Spears song with every Britney Spears move ever patented.

The program alternated 'Tween and Teen Queen candi
dates, and Xoe Chloe was programmed dead last . . .
wonder how that had happened, Temple thought, eyeing Dexter Manship at the judge's table. The peeping place she'd found was far stage left, behind a gargantuan array of gladioli spears. Nobody backstage or in the audience had spied her, so she was able to watch her competitors swivel and shake their way to true mediocrity.

When Mariah came through the curtain, it was like watching a tennis match. Snap her head to check her
roomie's poise. Great. The judges. Positive. Mama.
Stunned. The guy with her had to put a hand on her arm
to keep her in her seat, or maybe to keep her from going for her semiautomatic.

Mariah looked, what? Girly grown up without seeming
trashy. She looked all of nifty fifteen. She let the music precede her, as opposed to walking up to the mike and waiting like the other girls had, amateurs all. Make 'em
wait. Then she began the strong yearning song of the
lonely young Wicked Witch of the West from the Broadway hit,
Wicked.
Lyrics and melody showcased Mariah's
girlish contralto. Even Molina was relaxing, tilting back
in her chair. Shocked, awed, and smiling. "Defying Gravity" along with her daughter.

Way to go, roomie!

Temple joined the applause and watched the judges' pencils scratching high on their rating forms.

Somebody poked her in the back.

“Who is that?”

She turned. Rafi Nadir loomed over her and did not
look happy.

“My roommate."

“Not the kid. She did okay. Who's that with—?”

He wasn't going to say but he was glowering at the unidentified man with Molina. Or maybe he was glowering at Molina.

Rafi did not know that Temple knew their personal history, so she just played dumb.

“Who?"

“Never mind. I'll go check the crowd.”

He eyed Savannah Ashleigh, who had both cat carri
ers at her side. She'd take one or the other cat out from
time to time and pretend the kitty was writing in the
scores. Of course, she got lots of closeup camera atten-
tion every time she produced one of her gorgeous Per
sians.

Rafi vanished without another word, leaving Temple
time to look around for Louie. Louie loved Persians,
from her observation.

Yup. He was under the judges' table, the old dog! And snuffling at Dexter Manship's shoes. Maybe the old boy's
sniffer was getting a little dull, to be diverted from nearby unfixed Persian pheromones to a neighboring guy's shoes!

Now he was nudging the Elvis impersonator's boots.

Louie must be losing it.

Oh, well, it happened to the best of them. Who knew how old he really was? Right now she herself felt about forty.

And nothing was happening.

The judges were watching. The audience was watching.
And the police personnel were watching. Just watching.

Not only that, the evening event was almost over. Tem
ple suddenly discovered a whole herd of butterflies in the pit of her stomach.

Xoe Chloe was up in two shakes of a blonde mane.

Time to stop fretting over hidden killers and start
thinking about something serious, like sudden debilitat
ing stage fright.

Why had she ever agreed to this debacle? Sure, it's fine
for Xoe Chloe to make a fool of herself, but Temple had inherited some legitimate theater genes that demanded a decent performance.

Oh, well. Temple closed the curtain on her peephole
and withdrew backstage to wrestle her contrary muse,
Xoe Chloe, to the mat. Hopefully shaving foam free. . . .

The preprogrammed karaoke trio segued into the theme from James Bond.

Xoe Chloe burst through the side curtain, not the center one, on Rollerblades.

She spiked concrete on the space before center stage. Threw off her bicycle helmet, kicked off the blades. Tap danced up the three stairs to the mike.

She grabbed that sucker by the throat, tilted it almost horizontal like a rock star and strutted around it while
rapping in rhythm, kick boxing, clapping, ostrich feathers
flapping, on a beat in a counterpoint to the snare drum scratching and her high-heeled boots stamping and her
blonde hair shaking and she said and she said, who
knows, but the rhyme was the rhythm and rhythm was the reason and this was the Xoe Chloe season and . . . one . . .
more . . . time, and then another . . . we speak to the sisters and we speak to the brothers and we walk around the
world and watch it spin, and then we take it out for a walk
and let the bows begin.

The applause was the climax to the routine. The judges
were scratching furiously. Temple was blinking like the
idiot she felt she was: standing center stage, the mike
slowly swinging back to its proper upright position.

Louie was streaking out from under the judges' table—
all their heads bent to the score sheets—and . . . appar
ently panicked by Temple's raucous routine, climbing up the judges with his claws.

Climbing up one judge's sturdy sleeve in particular, which resulted in a dark hairy object flying up, up, and away, toward the pool.

“Louie!" Temple wailed into the mike.

The audience started singing "Louie, Louie" as if cued.
But the dark flying object, or DFO, was not Midnight Louie. It was someone . . .
something
else.

A thing Temple knew well from personal experience.
A black wig.

Elvis's sideburned headpiece.

Everyone eyed the bald man in the glittering jumpsuit, now flailing his arms at phantoms.

For Louie was gone.

Only the naked head was left.

The center of all regard.

The bull's eye that Alch and Su and a waiter and a man
in the audience converged on.

Dexter Manship leaped up, snatched the score sheet
from under the captive as he was rushed away, and leaped
onstage to push Xoe Chloe away from the mike.

“Forget the fuss, dear hearts. We have our winners.”

All the candidates rushed onstage to hear the verdict, pushing Temple to the back.

A hand was in hers, squeezing hard. Mariah's. Manship's voice carried over everything, including the scuffle as Elvis was led away.

By the fringe of the pool, a rapt Crawford Buchanan was blabbing into his ever-present mike, unaware of a black stalking form closing in on him at foot level.

The black cat pounced, leaping, claws out.

Backpeddling, Crawford and his mike took a plunge
into chlorinated water. No one even heard the splash. The
night had an unhappy ending. He didn't drown.

Chapter 56

As Blind as Bast

Naturally, having masterminded the revelation of the
criminal, I am thereafter ignored.

As soon as the police personnel present swarm the
faux Elvis, they compare notes and conclude he bears
a decided resemblance to a computer-aged image
of . . .
ta-dah! . . .
Arthur Dickson.

The whole tawdry scheme is immediately clear to all
and sundry, as it has been to me. (Naturally, I eaves
drop shamelessly, and unnoticed, as they gather to exchange notes.)
When ailing Crystal Cumming, aka Beth Marble,
brought her scheme for the reality show to the produc
ers, one of the silent partners was Arthur Dickson,
forced underground by his narrow escape from prose
cution for the first atrocity at his signature mansion.

Beth Marble, who no doubt took her false last name
from the sad monument to the life and death of her
shattered daughter and her own imminent fate, knew
the mansion had passed through many hands. She envisioned it as a court of justice for the woman who had,
perhaps inadvertently yet concretely, contributed to the
final downward spiral of her unfortunate daughter.

In using the scene of the worst moment of her life for
her revenge, poor Beth was unaware that her ex-
husband had also been drawn back to the bloody bat
tlefield. He had always known who she really was.

So he put himself into the TV show as a bizarre
judge, and finally found Beth in his power again. Once
she had stepped outside of the bounds of civility by
killing her daughter's misguided therapist, he killed her, hoping to end forever the quest for vengeance that had forced him underground.

However—and this I heard direct from the lipsticked
lips of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina as she explained it
to a Mr. Paddock of her recent acquaintance, unaware
of my collaboration at their foot level. Anyway, she told him (and thus me) that the body of the young girl in the
mall parking lot was the suspect's step-granddaughter.

The police surmised that the poor girl had recog
nized "Beth Marble" on the TV previews as her grandmother, and had come to the mall to confront her and perhaps urge her to give up the quest for revenge.

Fate stepped
_,
in to demand a dance, as it so often
does. A car nearly hit her in the parking lot. When the
driver stepped out to see to her, young Tiffany recog
nized him from the old newspaper clippings she had
been weaned on. Her surprise revealed her knowledge.
Arthur Dickson, so long anonymous, grabbed a screw
driver from the back seat of his vehicle and ensured his
continuing anonymity by killing his step-granddaughter,
just as his violent actions twenty years before had
wounded and ultimately destroyed his stepdaughter.

Whew. I am beginning to seriously re-examine myrelationships with my, er, esteemed long-lost maybe-
daughter Midnight Louise. Like who wants a fang
through the heart?

Before I can digest my ill-gotten information, I am surrounded by a congratulatory frill of Persians. Much thrumming and purring and swishing.

Miss Louise also shows up, returning from a suc
cessful expedition to scare Crawfish back into the pool
a second time. It is certain he will never cross paths
with a black cat again.

“Louie," cries Yvette in her sweet soft voice. "You have
singlemittedly revealed a villain and also dunked the
lowlife who was always after zee dirt on my mistress."

“
Well, yes," I admit. Then I glance at Miss Midnight
Louise, who is a trifle damp but no less triumphant.
"However, my associate was on the Crawfish Puke-
cannon case."

“Your associate?" The Divine Yvette lifts a perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“
Actually," I say, "she is my partner. In business, that
is. And my . . . possible offspring."

“Louie! You have admitted offspring?"

“Well, just one. One small insignificant one. Maybe.”

“You are an admitted single father?"

“
Maybe. These things happen to a guy. Like they
have been known to happen to a girl. It could be worse.
It could be a whole litter. Or a few dozen.”

The Divine One shows me the underside of her tail,
which is not too tacky, as she leaves. "I do not date secondhand goods.”

I am left alone with Miss Midnight Louise, who is not looking any too happy at my recent description of her.

But she holds her tongue for once, and sniffs, as I
have been doing much of lately.

“Good capture," she notes. "Small loss.”

That is for her to say and me to gnash my fangs over.

Chapter 57

The Past Is Prologue

Supposedly Matt had people skills.

Sixteen years as a parish priest and one as a hotline and
radio counselor should qualify him for anything.

He sat at a table in the Drake Hotel bar, all wood paneling and leather. His hotel would be the neutral ground. He felt like an anxious diplomat arranging for a secret meeting between Bush and Osama bin Ladin. The situation was explosive. So much could go wrong.

His mother arrived first, as arranged. She was wearing the Virgin Mary blue blouse and blue topaz earrings he'd bought her for Christmas with a gauzy black and silver skirt that had the Krys influence all over it.

She was a knockout.

She scanned the room expertly. Confidently. Serving
as hostess at a popular tourist restaurant had given her a new social poise. Dating again must have helped. Matt remembered the distinguished man in the camel-hair coatshe'd seated so graciously when he'd dined alone in "her" restaurant last Christmas.

Finding him, her dark eyes sparkled with greeting. She rushed over on her low-heeled pumps. Another symptom of the hostess job. Easy Spirit shoes for tired feet: neat, attractive, but not showy. The phrase could describe his mother's overall impact.

He stood to seat her. Bars always had such heavy
chairs that women found hard to sling around. Maybe to promote male chivalry. Maybe to anchor tipsy customers for another round or two.

“Matt." Her lips brushed his cheek before she sat.

No one would call this woman beaten down but that would have described her just months ago, before she
moved out of the old two-flat filled with bad memories in
the Polish section of Chicago and into a new apartment, job, and the strange cross-generational alliance with her punkish art student niece Krystyna.

Somehow, they were good for each other, so good they sometimes scared the heck out of him, between
Krys's obvious interest in him and his mother's simultaneous emotional unthawing after years of repression and guilt.

She knew that she was to meet someone important to her quest to find out about the man who'd fathered him,
the boy who'd gone off to combat after meeting her in the
St. Stan's church the night before Christmas.

“I can't believe you've found something out," she told him, ignoring the waitress who hovered behind her. Matt had been out of the priesthood long enough to know that
cocktail waitresses at your table side were a boon in most
bars, a boon that might not be repeated for too long.

“Have something, Mom.”

She glanced at the lowball glass in front of him. "A .. . scotch on the rocks."

“
House brand okay?”

She expertly eyed the bottles behind the bar, another new talent. "No. Johnny Walker Black.”

Go, Mom, go! You'll need it.

“
Who is this? One of the lawyers who offered me the deal back then?"

“I met him at the lawyers' offices." Temporizing.
"Thank you for doing this. I know they just would have
blown me off.”

Blown me
off?
Krys again.

She sat back as the drink was wafted onto a napkin before her.

“
I can't believe you got somewhere. Cheers." She
lifted the glass. Their rims clicked. She seemed excited and happy.

“It wasn't easy. They blew me off too on the first visit. So I came back and hung around the floor, watched who came and went."

“Just like a detective. Like that young lady friend of yours you say isn't a serious girlfriend. Tamara, was it?”

“Temple."

“Odd name for a girl." She sipped again, and sighed. "But they're doing that these days."

“It suits her."

“That's just because you're used to it. Because you like
her. A lot. Don't try to duck that. A mother knows. Maybe
you can bring her up here for next Christmas."

“Maybe. Mother—"

“
I thought we'd gotten past that formal stuff. Krys
doesn't even call me 'aunt' anymore. In fact, we were out shopping and someone mistook us for sisters. Can you imagine?"

“
Yeah. You look . . . really great, Mom. Someone
would probably mistake us for siblings too."

“I'd be honored to have such a handsome brother. Your uncles have all let beer bellies have their way with them. Don't you do that."

“
No chance. Uh, Mom, this person we're going to
meet, he didn't know anything about what the lawyers arranged."

“You mean he was taken in the way I was?"

“
Well, he was pretty young back then too. That's how I
connected to him; he had no idea that they'd offered you the two-flat as a bribe to keep me and you out of the family. He was pretty shocked. And angry."

“Anyone decent would be. It's not that I would have
wanted anything more than some legitimate child sup
port. The two-flat did help but it wasn't a substitute for a simple acknowledgment. So how did you find this man with a conscience?"

“
A paralegal dropped a name she shouldn't have.”

“What would that have to do with it?"

“
It was my father's name."

“Why would that mean anything to you?"

“
Because I saw a man who had that name. And he
looked like me."

“Oh, Matt." Her celebratory air crumbled. "That must
have been so . . . shocking for you. I didn't think that
might happen. That any relatives would still be associated with that law firm. What . . . was he? To you." She bit her
lip, reached out a hand to his. "I'm so sorry, honey.
I didn't think what sending you there might mean. I was
so selfish.”

The old apologizing-for-existing Mira was back. As much as her concern touched him, her regression chilled him. Maybe this was a very bad idea, even though it had been hers. He could still head this off.

“It was rough. I was way angrier than I thought I'd be.
Then I found out that . . . members of the . . . other fam
ily had been duped too. It was the parents. Your parents.
His parents. They took over and managed their errant
kids, the hell with what the ones actually involved needed
or wanted. Or what it would mean to me."

“You shouldn't swear," old Mira said primly, falling back on the party line.

“
I should do a lot more than that. I should dig up all
those dead grandparents who decided what was best for my parents and hit them.”

She looked shocked, then smiled nervously. "Berating the dead is a waste of time. You know that. If they'd have known you, they'd have been proud of you. My parents couldn't quite get past your . . . manner of birth but they didn't dislike you."